A delegation from BGI, visited the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) group at the Big Data Institute in Oxford, to discuss current and future research collaborations. BGI, located at Shenzhen in the south of China, is a world leading genomics research institute, which has pioneered the development of new high-throughput technologies for genome sequencing.
The visitors included Jian Wang, Co-founder of the BGI Group, Xun Xu, Director of BGI Research, Yong Hou, President of BGI Group Europe, and other chief BGI scientists. BGI and CKB have a longstanding collaboration, which started in 2011, when DNA extraction and genotyping of CKB samples was initiated.
The BGI-CKB collaboration involved setting up procedures for large-scale DNA extraction (more than 300,000 CKB samples completed) and genome-wide genotyping (more than 100,000 samples), using a custom array for Chinese developed by CKB with input from BGI. More recently, BGI has conducted whole genome sequencing on 10,000 CKB samples, which will help develop China region-specific 'imputation panels' which can improve genetic studies in Chinese populations. Future plans for the CKB-BGI partnership include large-scale whole genome sequencing and analyses of CKB samples, which will provide an immensely valuable resource for novel findings and discoveries about the genetic basis of many diseases.